Get over your hill and see
by intastella burst
Summary: Sam watches panic rip its way across Dean's face like a line of salt scattered, eyes huge, glassy, green. Pre-series. Sam/Dean. Warning: incest.


_And pestilence has won when you are lost  
and I am gone_

_

* * *

_

The first time it happens Sam is seventeen years old, and being in the same room with his father is enough to make him want to take a gun (Dean's, probably, 9mm and beautiful, he's coveted it as long as he can remember, and Sam never forgets these things) to his head and just hold that trigger down. So, Sam gets out. Takes his father's car, still warm, and drives until he sees daylight.

Sam is seventeen and the rage in his blood is chemical. John doesn't come after him shouting, rifle in hands like a madman, though that's the way he comes after Sam in his head. Things never work out the way they do in his head, and yet. He pictures his father before him on the road, lets the image of anger and alcoholism and barely-suppressed fanaticism grow until it is monstrous, distorted, like the shine of water through glass and that's not glass in front of him, that's blacktop and sometimes it's more difficult than it should be to tell the difference. It could break, you know. It could break and Sam would fall straight through. Sam doesn't drink as much as his father and his brother do. He doesn't need it to feel this way. The anger is self-generating.

(Sam had nearly said _I'll kill you._ I'll kill you so don't stop me.)

* * *

He comes home to a quiet house, and for all of a tenth of a second he entertains the distant hope that maybe Dean won't find out about the fight, the smashed mirror in the bathroom and the picture frames overturned on the coffee table. Maybe Sam can cover up the damage and maybe John will sleep it off and forget it ever happened, because Sam has school starting next week and a life to lead, maybe, and if there is one thing he cannot deal with it is a betrayed and vengeful Dean, clear-eyed with his own righteousness and his inability to ever let Sam have anything of his own, _ever_, whether it's a turn in the driver's seat or a disagreement with their father.

So. Sam folds himself into the four-by-six bathroom, all low ceilings and peeling pink rabbit wallpaper, and focuses on cleaning up, creating the illusion of well-restedness, doing his best to erase the brown circles beneath his eyes, the persistent hunch in his shoulders, stuck that way from hours at the wheel. The buzz in his veins will be harder to get rid of (he's drunk, maybe, he'd stopped at a bar, never been more thankful for his fake ID). Sam is good at concealing things. He made a point of stopping to fill the gas tank before coming home. So it won't be his fault when they run out. Damage control can only do so much.

The front door slams and Sam freezes, hikes up the towel around his waist and ventures the two-yard walk from the bathroom to the room he shares with Dean, although if he's honest, he's been spending more nights than not out on the couch in the front room, falling asleep sitting up with a college brochure or three in his lap and faint yellow TV-lights spreading eerie shadows around the room. College is really not a shouting match that Sam is prepared to have, so it's just as well he keeps to himself these days. Sleeping in the same room with Dean, barely an arm's width between their two cots, Dean sprawled across his with his shirt rucked up across his stomach and this lazy grin on his face that Sam is sure Dean saves just for him-well, that's another thing Sam can't deal with.

All Sam wants out of life is the possibility of a cure, a fix, a day when he'll wake up and look in the mirror and say _you sick fuck, wanting your brother like air for so long, well thank god_ that's _over_. There will be a girl, and kids in a minivan, and money to spare and a love that doesn't fester inside like a cancer, and his adolescence will be relegated to the damp metallic aftertaste of a fever dream, a nightmare barely remembered.

Sam rummages through the pile of laundry at the foot of his bed for his shorts, a t-shirt, doesn't bother with socks. They're nearing the end of the longest, driest summer of Sam's life (heat that's all stick-to-your-skin, kill-you-in-your-sleep), and the worst one too, but that goes without saying. New Mexico seems like it would be fun for the tourists, but Sam is here on business and there's nothing for it but to do it. That's what his dad says, anyway, mantra drilled into Sam's head like the shooting and salting and the Latin incantations he won't ever forget. He sits at the end of his bed, suddenly profoundly exhausted. There's a hangover coming on. The inside of his mouth tastes sour and dank.

Dean storms in then, eyes blazing, "you stupid motherfucker, where in hell were you, Dad's been looking for you all night, do you have any fucking clue what's out there you idiot, you took the fucking _car_, what the hell-" he's all up in Sam's face, hands swerving through the air like swan-diving toy planes, all bravado, no control. For a moment Sam thinks Dean's about to hit him. He's got to pre-empt that somehow, right? So Sam's fingers catch around Dean's wrist, white with the absence of a watch, and Sam can feel the heart there, the mad race of it. Sam very slowly and very deliberately and very suicidally rolls his thumb against the pulsing _thrum-thrum._ He does it again.

Sam watches panic rip its way across Dean's face like a line of salt scattered, eyes huge, glassy, green. Sam has lived in more states than he has fingers to count on (twenty, he thinks at a guess, that's the number he'd heard his father give Dean a few months ago, both of them sitting on the porch piss-drunk in the cold clear night and Sam watching from the orange-lit inside) and he has never found the equal of Dean's riptide green eyes. Sam's fingers dig into the seam at the inside of his thigh and he shifts, scoots forwards to the end of the end of his bed. Dean hasn't blinked once. His breathing is short, a high whistle at the end of every exhale. Sam, he says, and it's a question, a plea, a protest, it's everything.

Sam's eyes track Dean's every movement, shoulders, rising and falling too fast, down bare sun-marked arms to hands, short-cut nails and whitened scars and Sam's sick with how much he wants those hands on him, face neck wrists arms hair. And that's just for starters. He pulls Dean forwards by the grey hem of his shirt, and it's so much easier than it should be, moving a mountain without even breaking a sweat.

Dean moves, stops just short of touching him. His face has shuttered closed but he ends up standing between Sam's legs anyway, and that's not surprising, really. It doesn't feel like something that can be controlled, leashed, buried or burned. Dean's sense of self-preservation is as wrecked as it is possible for such an instrument to be without actually dying of atrophy. Sam's pretty sure that's his fault, was his fault long before he could understand what it meant, and now that he does, well, there's nothing left to do with this weakness but exploit it.

He sighs, "Dean," and Dean's face twists like Sam's hit him. This shouldn't happen in the daylight, Sam knows, because daylight takes such things and turns them ashen-faced and terrible, ghouls from the back of the family tree. It's in their blood, Sam thinks frenetically, madly, it has to be, and Dean has to want it too or he wouldn't be looking like that. He wouldn't be looking like that if he knew what it was doing to Sam, who is deeply horrified at himself and yet unable to curb this course of action. He's watching himself from the ceiling, trapped, a bare image of himself. Because Sam feels as if his heart is being carved out of him with a scalpel. Once the procedure is complete it will be irreversible. Nothing for it but to endure.

Sam looks down at the soft sliver of grey between his long grown-man fingers and remembers crying into this shirt, years ago when he'd had pneumonia and no nurse but his brother. He remembers wanting the shirt for his own and being disappointed when it pulled too tight at the shoulders. He inhales, shudders out a sigh. At that Dean slaps Sam's hands away and turns. He has the look of a man woken from a restless sleep, and not really glad of it.

"Dean," Sam says, because he has never said Dean's name in this way before and now that he's started he can't stop, "Dean, you can't, I. I've always-"

Dean lurches for the door at that, but Sam's there first, grabbing him by the shoulder and spinning. Dean doesn't resist, probably immediately hates himself for it. Sam takes a fortifying breath. "Just, don't. Don't leave, okay?" He feels dizzy, ill, summer heat and cheap gin getting to him at last, and he knows the instant this is over he'll be on his knees by the sink.

He drops his mouth to Dean's neck and bites, soft, all lips no teeth. Dean jolts, swears, pushes himself against Sam and away, so violent Sam's stomach flips. Dean's breathing hard, almost hyperventilating, hands quivering to the ends, wrists, palms, white-knuckled fingers. His eyes are frozen, though, huge, more black than green. Sam's simultaneously picturing the tiny, perfectly circular hickey he's left at Dean's pulsepoint and contemplating the complete and utter fucked-upness of this, this moment, wondering how it ever became his life. The dark black fog in his brain consumes.

"_What_-" Dean's voice shakes, a register higher than normal. Sam fills in the blanks: _what is wrong with you. _(Everything.) _What are you doing. _(I wish I knew.) Dean looks stricken, and that's when Sam decides. The slamming of a door has him bolting, past his furious father, down the front porch and into the blindingly beautiful day.

His bare feet slap against stinging concrete as he runs. He can't hear Dean's yelling but he can feel his eyes on the back of his neck like a pair of shatteringly emerald needles. There is a headache building at the back of his skull, ribs in his chest like knives. He shakes, perseveres, kicks up gravel and shouts.

The road is an endless arc and Sam is composed of an endless energy. He stops for breath at the crossroads outside of town. His feet leave bloody prints every three paces. He's drawn a map from his heart to his home without even trying.

A man says, you run like you've got hell on your back, boy, and Sam turns his face to the sun and says, _yes_.


End file.
